Harking Back to the Humanities
A PROFESSOR of Romance literature in one of our foremost universities has a very sad story to tell, to illustrate the declining vogue of those studies which used to be called the humanities. In his introductory course in the literature of the Italian Renaissance he had had two young women, intelligent, charming — to teach whom was a delight. He had confidently looked to them the following year to take the advanced course, but at the time of registration they did not appear. Besought for an explanation, they said that his lecture hours conflicted with those of another course they had elected — in abnormal psychology. Charming young women; abnormal psychology: no wonder the professor of Renaissance culture shook his head.
It is everywhere much the same. At Harvard, out of a total of 2334 students in the college, less than three hundred, or about one in eight, are pursuing either Greek or Latin, and many of these elect only a single course or two. The number of those who achieve any considerable degree of classical culture is much smaller.
Yet our professor of Romance literature grew even more pessimistic over another phase of modern education, an almost universal reaction against freedom in the choice of studies—the so-called Harvard elective system. His own university, until lately Harvard’s most prominent ally, had only just joined the ranks of those that require students to make the main body of their electives not a scattering of unrelated subjects but a consistent and coherent group. It had not occurred to him, as it seemed, that there might have been some connection between the extension of the elective system and the decline in the humanities, and conversely that the reaction against it may be a symptom of hope and cheer.
I
As has often been pointed out, the elective system is largely a product of the scientific awakening of the nineteenth century. A maze of new branches had been discovered on the tree of knowledge — some of which might perhaps be described as its trunk. Undergraduate life, indeed the entire span of human existence, was too brief to compass them all. The practical difficulty of the situation might have given the ordinary mind what is sometimes called pause. Not so the scientific mind. It is the first article in the modern creed that all knowledge is of equal importance, all training of equal value, provided only that the knowledge and the training are in the line of accurate classified knowledge.
This is no abstract theory. It is rule of thumb — the glorious guiding principle, if you will — by which the elective system has been erected. President Eliot, in an address entitled “Aims of the Higher Education,” reprinted in his volume on educational reform, states it explicitly. “There is to-day no difference between the philologist’s method of study and the naturalist’s, or between a psychologist’s method and a physiologist’s. Students of history and natural history, of physics and metaphysics, of literature and the fine arts, find that, though their fields of study are different, their methods and spirit are the same. This oneness of method characterizes the true university.” You may study the French Revolution, or (that object of Ibsen’s casual satire) the domestic industries of Brabant in the Middle Ages, and so long as you study them scientifically they count equally for the degree in arts. You may study liter a time and science — let us say Petrarch and abnormal psychology — but in “the true university” the spirit and the methods will be identical.
One or two examples will illustrate the practical absurdity that resulted from the attempt to construct a system of education on this theory, and especially in view of the fact that the rubric of it all was entire freedom in the choice of studies. I remember — if I may speak of what I know best — I remember electing a course that centred in the French Revolution, as an aid to the study of modern literature and drama. The lecturer spent hour after hour droning over the series of constitutions that were framed and adopted one day to be superseded the next. What was picturesque and dramatic in the period, even what was of the deepest and most permanent significance, he neglected, or at best passed it over with a small sarcasm at the vanity of so much passion and bloodshed. Constitutions were matters of scientific record, and the soul-history of a great nation in its greatest crisis was not.
Again, I elected to study the Elizabethan drama. The preliminary course was a minute verbal scrutiny of five of the plays of Shakespeare, in which the consideration of literature as literature was casual and incidental. It was strongly recommended that the student repeat this course, philologizing five more plays. The study of the Elizabethan drain a as such was limited to two half courses, which were in no wise to be repeated or extended. In order to get at the drama one was required to plough through an equal dose of philology, and it was recommended that the dose be doubled. Decidedly, the play was not the thing. The thing was words, words, words. That was what the glorious proffer of free election came to.
In the end, it is true, one did arrive, in any department of language, at drama qua drama, inspiringly taught. Even under such conditions the cold passion for science cannot quite congeal the human spirit. In recent years, owing to the reaction of which I am writing, the humanities are made more prominent, even in the courses primarily philological. Yet the fact remains that in the “true university” of to-day they are, and are intended to be, subordinate to science.
II
The very ideal of a liberal education has been metamorphosed to fall in with the new and absorbing passion. Again I quote the most powerful advocate of the “true university,” though any one of a dozen utterances by different educators would do as well. “Science has engendered a. peculiar kind of human mind — the searching, open, humble mind, which, knowing that it cannot attain unto all truth, or even to much new truth, is yet patiently and enthusiastically devoted to the pursuit of such little new truth as is within its grasp, having no other end than to learn, prizing above all things accuracy, thoroughness, and candor in research, proud and happy, not in its own single strength, but in the might of that host of students whose past conquests make up the wondrous sum of present knowledge, whose sure future triumphs are shared in imagination by each humble worker. Within the past four hundred years this typical scientific mind has gradually come to be the kind of philosophic mind most admired by the educated class; indeed it has come to be the only kind of mind, except the poetic, which commands the respect of scholars, whatever their department of learning.”
Unquestionably there is fire in these words. But is it not the kind of fire which inflames the palm that has held a block of ice? What, after all, is the business of a university? Has it not a duty to young men as well as a duty to knowledge ? In order to give science its due, is it necessary to ignore altogether Lhe human heart arid the human will — character ?
How many boys go to college, how many parents send them there, to achieve that peculiar kind of human mind which rejoices not in its own strength, and has no other end than to learn ? It may seem a philistine thing to say, yet it is indubitably true, that boys go to college, and that their parents pay the considerable cost of their educations, not to become searching and humble, but to realize the proud strength of the human mind and heart; not to feed their minds on the little new truth within their grasp — spare diet! — but on the many great truths of nature, history, and art: not to narrow their spirits to minute special research, but to expand them in contact with the Promethean fire of the great personalities and the great movements of civilization.
And this is only half of what in America we look for in our universities. As a people we place equal value upon the moral and social side of undergraduate life — upon democracy and manly comradeship as expressed in college spirit: upon personal courage, self-control, and chivalrous generosity as expressed in true sportsmanship. To these things the partisans of the “true university” pay little or no heed. In President Eliot’s weighty volume on educational reform they are not considered. Somewhere and somehow there is a lack of coordination between the nation and its universities.
A brief historical retrospect will perhaps put the case in a clearer light. Our universities, like our institutions in general and our people, were originally, and still are, preponderantly English. But the scientific awakening of the nineteenth century, though in a considerable measure the product of English minds, had its origin and ran its course without the university walls. To this day Oxford is powerfully — to our view obstinately, suicidally — resisting it. In Germany, on the other hand, the universities early became imbued with the scientific spirit, and, following their lead, the American universities have for almost a century valued it and cultivated it. In a word, though founded in accordance with native ideals that still endure and flourish in the nation at large, they have largely made themselves over in accordance with the ideals of an alien people. Now Germany, as it happens, has its own peculiar schools of character. The discipline which the young American gets on the athletic field, in the close community and under the rigid standards of college life, the young German gets, and in an infinitely higher degree, in the army or the bureaucracy. The business of the German university is not at all to discipline character. Quite the contrary, it is to enfranchise it from Kaiserism and red tape. The universities are the great strongholds of German liberty. Their watchwords are the freedom to learn and the freedom to teach. In England and America liberty and truth have been an undisputed heritage for two centuries and more.
In all this we have assumed that the German and the American universities are, roughly, parallel institutions; for that has been the tacit assumption of the advocates of the elective system. The fact is far otherwise. The German university is built on the foundation of the Gymnasium and the Realschvle, which carry the student: at least as far as the end of the second year of the American college. Now the instruction in these German preparatory schools is thoroughly organized in groups, production both of coherent knowledge and mental training. In the Gymnasium an extended study of the ancient classics is prescribed. Our elective system, disorganized to the point of anarchy, is not so much an imitation of German methods as a caricature of them.
That our universities have responded to the modern scientific impulse is wholly admirable. But in doing so was it necessary to renounce the function of mental training, of character-building and of humanistic culture, which is not only native to them, but vital in the scheme they are ostensibly emulating ? By their most recent deeds they are confessing that it was not.
III
From the outset the sense of the great body of educated people, and of a large proportion even of college faculties, has been against the doctrinary extremes to which we have carried our imitation of things German. Almost a generation ago Harvard went through a reaction that still gives occasion for thought, and perhaps also for a smile of far from subtle irony.
The question was of student freedom. It seemed a monstrous thing to the progressive element in the faculty that men in a great university should be subject to petty police regulations in the matter of residence and attendance at lectures. Here, with one stroke of the pen, it was possible to make the university quite like Berlin, Leipsic, and Bonn.
For once the undergraduates were in full accord with the faculty. Midnight potations in Boston were no longer disturbed by thoughts of the nine o’clock lecture in Cambridge. To the moosehunter it ceased to be evidence of the eternal unfitness of things that his season in the woods should be cut short by term time. Skater, snowshoer, and tobogganer partook deeply of the joys of the ice carnival in Montreal. At the season when winter had become darkest and most oppressive, one party of undergraduates woke up in the Grand Central Station in New York, still clad in their evening clothes. After due consideration, they decided that their purpose the night before must have been to spend the month of February under the clement skies of Bermuda; and stopping only to buy the necessary flannels on Broadway, they embarked forthwith. Lernfreiheit bade fair to eventuate in a sort of Lehrfreiheit which the faculty had little taste for, namely an entire freedom from any one to lecture to. The Board of Overseers and parents everywhere were even more deeply moved. The life of this experiment in the ways of the “true university” was short.
From that moment it should have been evident that the spirit and needs of our young men are, in many respects, infinitely removed from those of the German undergraduate. They are, in fact, essentially similar to those of the Oxford and Cambridge man. In the English universities no one is allowed to leave his college after nine o’clock; and to remain without the walls after midnight, on whatever pretext, is a. crime punishable and punished with expulsion. Far from considering this régime an infringement of his liberties, the young Briton regards it as part and parcel of a system which he respects and loves. Much as he might relish the autumn hunting in the shires, or the spring gayeties of the Eondon season, he loves his life as an undergraduate more, and acquiesces in the college gate-rules, vexatious though they often are, as the very foundation of the social and athletic, as well as of the studious life, of his college — of the humanities, in short, in the broad arid true meaning of the term. For the American youth, of course, the full rigor of the English regulations is impossible; but he might be led far in the same direction if it were made evident to him that that way lies a better ordered and more wholesome life.
For a dozen years past there has been a strong tendency, quite unconscious in all probability, to revert toward the typically English university methods, or rather to compass them a second time in the lull swing of the cycle of progress. It was at Harvard that this tendency first showed itself, and Harvard has the greatest need of reform, at least among eastern institutions. But other universities have carried it to a far fuller and more efficient development, and are destined, as it seems, at no distant day to perfect it. Its manifestations are many and varied, but it is chiefly evident in three new departures : a system of grouping electives so as to make them cover some broad and vital department of knowledge, tutorial instruction, and residence in coördinate colleges or halls.
IV
All three, it will be seen, involve an increase of the personal element in the relations of teachers and pupils.
Under the old régime, in England and America, all undergraduates studied the same subjects in the same order, and nothing was taught besides the prescribed curriculum. At Oxford still the scope of election is narrow: one may choose among several “honor schools,” — Literal Humaniores, Modern History, Mathematics, Science, and English,—but having chosen, the course of study is virtually prescribed. One might exhaust the entire instruction of an English university in a dozen years. In the leading American universities the body of instruction is so large — and this is the signal service of the elective system—that it would take a hundred years and more to take all the courses offered by the faculty of arts and sciences; and it is permitted either to pursue a more general course than in England or to specialize more narrowly; though, as I have indicated, the ponderous array of electives is primarily calculated for the scientific specialist, and so tends to block the path of the student of the humanities.
Many American universities, as for example Yale, long resisted the extreme development of the elective system; they still prescribed the subjects of the old curriculum as of primary and fundamental value, from the point of view both of mind and character-building and of humanistic culture. It is a curious example of conservatism that Yale, after a slow process of yielding, finally surrendered to the elective system four years ago, when the reaction at Harvard was already vigorous. Other universities, notably Cornell, have been more alert both in adopting the system and in reacting against its extremes. Wisconsin, to the superficial view scientific to the point of utilitarianism, vigorously insists on the grouping of studies. Even Harvard has provided that the highest honors at graduation shall be awarded only for a consistent and orderly group of studies, and offers a body of courses in comparative literature the primary purpose of which is cultural.
Princeton has very happily combined conservatism with progress, and has thus become the leader in the present advance. As Professor West has described a rather complicated system, “the earlier part of the course” consists “mainly of prescribed studies of fundamental and general nature,” while “the latter part of the course” consists of “studies of which a majority lie in some large department of the student’s own choice, the remaining courses being free — in other words a system of gradual and progressive election based on a prescribed substratum.” Such a system combines, in the earlier years, the essentials of the Gymnasium and the elder American college, and, in the later years, the essentials of the German and the American university. Throughout there is a system of intimate personal instruction analogous to the tutorial system of the modern English and the early American college.
In the absence of some such organization, that is, under the elective system, it is necessary, in order to make the wisest practicable grouping, that the student plan his entire undergraduate course from the start, with the guidance of some one who knows his peculiar bent and abilities. At Harvard this was early recognized, at least by the reactionary element. Each freshman is given an adviser. In connection with the formal lectures, furthermore, it has been found advisable to have a system of personal conferences. In many universities this takes the form of what are known as quiz sections. In the larger and more elementary courses, Harvard has established a system of individual conferences held by instructors under the professor in charge of the course. In a word —although it is unfortunately a word of ill repute in America — a promising start has been pretty generally made toward tutorial instruction.
As yet it is only a start. In England the tutor comes into close personal relations with his pupils from the outset, and follows them throughout their undergraduate course. The freshman adviser at Harvard has twenty-five new men each year. It is humanly impossible that he become intimately acquainted with each of them, or be familiar with all the varied courses they elect. Furthermore, he receives no additional pay for his office and has usually no time even to do what little he might. In point of fact he is not required to see his advisees except at the opening of the college year, and then he does little more than scrutinize lists of electives to make sure that there is no conflict in the lecture hours. In many cases he is regarded by his charges less as a guide and friend than as a police officer. The instructors in conference deal with a far larger body of undergraduates and — not being primarily scientists — are miserably underpaid. They are mostly raw and recent graduates supporting themselves in advanced study. Quite lately the undergraduates themselves have protested against their negligence and incompetence. like the new plan for grouping electives, the freshman advisers and instructors in conference are an uninspired concession to the ideals of the impotent minority of progressives.
Princeton alone, of all American colleges, has given personal instruction in the humanities a fair trial. In every study every student has, in addition to the lecturing professor, a tutor called preceptor, whose duty it is to direct his reading, and, by means of personal conferences, to make sure that he has assimilated it to the best of his ability. Each conference lasts an hour, and the number of students in each is limited to four, or at most five. Great care is taken to have the groups of students composed of men of similar attainments and mental calibre, so that progress may be as even and rapid as possible. The preceptors are liberally paid, receiving as much as the average assistant professor. According to all indications the preceptorial system is a signal success. Its advocates report that it has done much in only two years to remove prejudice, once so strong in the mind of the Princeton undergraduate. against reading and book talk, supplanting it with a real interest in things of the mind.
The innovation is less anomalous than may appear to the casual view. In point of fact it is exactly parallel to the most cherished scientific methods. The basis of the instruction of the “true university has long been a corps of laboratory assistants, whose business is to train the student in the use of the microscope and dissecting knife, and in the proper observation and recording of results. Even the most advanced scientific students are taught by means of seminars, under the personal supervision of leading professors. One of the most frequent objections to the preceptorial system is its cost. But on the whole it is probably less expensive than the long existing system of laboratories and seminars.
In certain ways the Princeton preceptor differs from the English tutor, and as it seems, to his disadvantage. He does not, in the first place, follow an undergraduate through the four years of the course. In the first two years, the work of which is a varied grouping of general courses, the student has a different preceptor in each course. The authorities wished this otherwise; but — and this is a sharp commentary upon education in the “true university”—it was impossible to find recent graduates prepared to teach all freshman and sophomore studies. In the two later years, however, during which the studies are elected by groups, each student, as in England, has a single preceptor.
Again, whereas the English tutor works with an eye direct upon the two great examinations, set by a university examining board and leading directly to the degree, the Princeton preceptor is, in many courses, concerned only with collateral reading, having no direct bearing on the examinations — which, as in all American universities, are set severally bv the professors in the several courses. Both the English and the American examination systems have characteristic virtues and defects; but it may safely be conjectured that personal instruction in the humanities will not be as valuable as it is in the sciences until it bears some vital relation to the final degree.
V
In 1894 a paper by Frank Bolles, late secretary of Harvard College, was published posthumously in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine. It was entitled “The Administrative Problem,” and dealt with the difficulty, amounting to an impossibility, of the merely official supervision of the increasing hordes of undergraduates. The plight of Harvard is only a little more pitiful than that of all other leading American universities. New wine in old bottles is bad enough; but when the wine is abundant and the bottles small there is a spilling as well as a bursting. The small colleges of a century ago have doubled and redoubled many times without changing their administrative system. The remedy Mr. Bolles proposed was to divide the student body into administrative units, roughly corresponding to those of the English university.
A few years later a graduate resident at Oxford became impressed with the idea that the same arrangement, in a somewhat completer form, would also remove certain evils in the residential and social life, which had suffered equally in outgrowing the system of the earlier day; and he published a book advocating this view. Any servile imitation of things English was obviously as unwise as impracticable; but by adapting certain fruitful ideas to our needs it seemed easily possible to revive the virtues of the small American college, not only without impairing the intellectual life of the university, but to its decided advantage, in making it more intimate and human. Many leading educators have lately hit upon a similar solution. As President Wilson of Princeton has very happily phrased it, the aim of the university should be to make the social and the intellectual life interpenetrate.
Again Harvard, though first in the field, has proved a laggard in achievement, and for the same reason. Many undergraduates and graduates, and a considerable number of the faculty, have long favored an administrative and social division of the student body; but the funds and energy of the corporation have been expended in the opposite direction — toward extending the already vast body of scientific electives. Two of the private dormitories, however, Claverly and Randolph, have evolved certain very interesting phases of collegiate life, Randolph being, architecturally and otherwise, the nearest approach to an English university college in America. At certain other American universities the idea, though as yet embryonic, is backed by those in authority, and is thus likely to come speedily to realization.
The University of Chicago has a number of “halls,” each organized as a unit under faculty supervision; and it plans, as soon as funds are available, to give each its separate commons. These halls, however, are not quadrangular, but of the familiar style of dormitory. The University of Wisconsin has lately received a grant from the state legislature of one hundred thousand dollars a year for the erection of living accommodations for the students, who have hitherto, except for the small minority of fraternity men, lodged and boarded in a welter of minute and shifting cliques in the houses of townsfolk. It is President Van Hise’s intention to build the “dormitories ” in the quadrangular form, each with its kitchen and dining-hall, President Schurman of Cornell has long publicly advocated the building of residential halls, and is favorably considering the idea of giving each not only a kitchen and dining-room, but a master and a group of resident graduates corresponding to the English dons. President Wilson of Princeton, to whose energy and originality we owe the system of preceptors, has announced his intention of dividing the student body into colleges or halls, each with its own commons and dons; and though his purpose of disestablishing the upper-class eating clubs has provoked vigorous and not unreasonable opposition, he will certainly in the end achieve some effective reform. There is more than a coincidence here. A universal evil is finding its universal remedy.
VI
Unless all signs fail, higher education in America has entered a new phase of vast significance. Precious as has been the impulse from Germany, — it has in fact been in valuable, — its absolute dominance is passing. Whether the ancient classics will ever regain their predominance in liberal education may be doubted, but when they are taught as literature and not merely as philology they cannot fail mightily to increase their appeal. The important fact is that the human spirit is asserting itself as of at least equal importance with the passion for pure science. The man of broad culture will take his place beside the narrow researcher. Character and style, in living and thinking and writing, will be no less regarded than the conquest of new truth.
To the country at large this new humanistic revival is of deep significance. The scientific spirit, in its most altruistic development, as embodied in the special researcher, has of necessity withdrawn itself very far from the actual and present needs of the nation, political, commercial, and social. At its most practical, in the technical schools, its aim has been frankly utilitarian. The great need of modern America is an impulse away from materialism and toward higher standards of living, moral, intellectual, and spiritual; and it is a hopeful sign of the times that no one has been more vigorous in sounding the advance than the president of our foremost technical university, Cornell. Already we have made mighty progress in the purification of personal life, of business and of statecraft. For the purpose of furthering the movement and conserving it no better engine could be devised than a system of universities in which the chosen youth of the nation shall be brought in contact with the best standards of the human spirit, in their comradeships and their games no less than in things of the mind.
For the universities the departure should prove epoch-making. Hitherto there have been two broadly differentiated types of higher institutions in America, the small college and the large, or more accurately speaking, the college and the university. Princeton has been the most perfect example of the one, Harvard of the other. Both are now seen to be tending toward the same goal, the union of the spirit of pure science with that of the ripest humanities. There is still a long way to go. Princeton is as imperfect in scientific teaching as Harvard is in the organization of study. Nor are the two elements anywhere successfully mingled. But it is not too much to hope that eventually we shall reproduce, in a form assimilated to our national needs, all that is valuable in the two great types of modern university, the English and the German.